Delivering more value with fewer resources. In an accounting sense, this is the “bottom line” of leadership. Leadership is organizing resources, especially people, to achieve more than they otherwise would without you.
I think of this concept as “Force Multiplication”. The term itself is rooted in military science, but the principle applies to almost all forms of leadership.
In military science, force multiplication or a force multiplier is a factor or a combination of factors that gives personnel or weapons (or other hardware) the ability to accomplish greater feats than without it.
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Don’t Be a Force Subtractor
This sounds beyond obvious. And yet how many leaders have you worked with that end up disrupting work more than they facilitate it?
Leaders are, almost by definition, in a position of power. That power can just as easily hamper a team as it can propel it.
Subtractors are often leaders doing things that deliver value “up” the organizational hierarchy without sufficient consideration for the cost imposed on those tasked with it. As leaders, we need to consider the net value and cost to the organization, as a whole.
Pull People up, Don’t Drag Them Out
The worst possible way to get more out of people is by working them harder.
Unless your team is working well below their baseline in terms of sustainable pace, this is only appropriate for short bursts. It isn’t a viable long-term strategy and requires corresponding periods of downtime to recover.
Leaders who seek to get more value from their team by pushing them to “just work harder” aren’t really leaders they are cattle prods.
Let’s put aside the wider societal issues of corporations extracting as much value from people regardless of the human cost aside for a second. This is still a terrible approach.
- There is a fairly low upper limit to how much more value you can extract from people this way.
- It will cause more and more mistakes to creep in, ultimately undoing any productivity gain.
- Creative thinking will be crushed, killing your team's ability to solve problems and outmaneuver your competition.
- You’ll burn out your team, and they’ll either “quietly quit” or really quit.
Diminishing Returns of Direct Contributions
As you progress as an individual, it will become harder and harder to increase the direct value you can provide to a project. Depending on your field, it may even be a challenge to just keep up to date as the technical landscape progresses around you.
As a leader, your greatest opportunity to create additional value is through driving improvements in others, both as individuals and the team as a collective.
In order to do this, it will be important for you to continue your growth in your industry or domain of choice. The opportunities to apply your skills and experience directly will become narrower and more limited.
Get More out of your Team as Individuals
Whilst it might be possible for you to increase your personal effectiveness by, say 10%, you are limited in your ability to bring that improvement to bear. On the other hand, if you can evoke that same 10% improvement in each of your team members, even if each 10% represents less value, the sum total value is almost certainly significantly greater.
What’s more, they start to stack up.
Get More out of your Team Collectively
If a team is more than the sum of its parts, those individual ten percents will start to compound on each other.
Teams aren’t automatically more than the sum of their parts, though. You have to shape your team in such a way as to ensure that each individual's contribution force multiplies every other individual’s contribution.
Become a force multiplier of force multipliers.
The One Question To Ask Yourself as a Leader
If you only ask yourself one question as a leader, it should be:
How much more value does my team deliver as a result of me being present than they would otherwise?
If the answer to this isn’t a significant amount, then you need to take a long hard look at your leadership qualities and management style.
One exception might be if you have made yourself redundant, a target for all truly great leaders. In this case, it is probably time for you to find a new challenge.